in an ingratiating but not very successful attempt to appear bred to the
manner.

Tilda remarked that the company took their new positions with some
formality. The shepherd alone comported himself carelessly, slouching
around to the back of the fire, where he lit a clay pipe from the embers
and seated himself on one of the ingle-ends, so that his tobacco smoke
had a clear passage up the chimney. Then, almost before the children
knew what was happening, the Minister gave out a hymn.

All sang it lustily, and when it was ended all dropped on their knees.
The Minister broke into prayer--at first in smooth, running sentences,
formal thanksgivings for the feast just concluded, for the plenty of
seedtime and harvest, for the kindly fruits of the earth, with
invocations of blessing upon the house and the family. But by and by,
as these petitions grew more intimate, his breath came in short gasps.
"O the Blood!" he began to cry; "the precious Blood of Redemption!"
And at intervals one or other of his listeners answered "Amen!"
"Hallelujah!" Tilda wondered what on earth it was all about; wondered
too--for she knelt with her back to the great fireplace--if the shepherd
had laid by his pipe and was kneeling among the ashes. Something in the
Minister's voice had set her brain in a whirl, and kept it whirling.

"Glory! Glory! The Blood! Glory be for the Blood!"

And with that, of a sudden the man was shouting a prayer for _her_--for
her and Arthur Miles, "that these two lambs also might be led home with
the flock, and sealed--sealed with the Blood, with the precious Blood,
with the ever-flowing Blood of Redemption--"

Her brain seemed to be spinning in a sea of blood . . . Men and women,
all had risen from their knees now, and stood blinking each in the
other's faces half-stupidly. The Minister's powerful voice had ceased,
but he had set them going as a man might twirl a teetotum; and in five
or six seconds one of the men--it was Roger, the young giant--burst
forth with a cry, and began to ejaculate what he called his
"experience." He had been tempted to commit the Sin without Pardon; had
been pursued by it for weeks, months, when alone in the fields; had been
driven to wrestle with it in hollows and waste places, Satan always at
his ear whispering to him to say the words of blasphemy, to cross the
line, to have rest of mind though it were in damnation. To Tilda this
was all mere gibberish, but to the youth and to h